I mean, boys like funko pops, action figures (or little bags of plastic dinosaurs), owning their own sports and exercise equipment, mancaves, hobby crafts, fishing, etc. How many microbrewing kits do you think are gathering dust in a garage somewhere? Do people really need personal motorboats? Project cars? Why do you need a 240V hookup and an in-trailer shower when you go camping? Why gas grills? “Landscaping”? Why do we manufacture cheap plastic tools that break easy?

Liking cute and pretty things isn’t bad, and wasn’t always this bad, either. You don’t need plastic flowers when real ones will just pop out of the ground. We used to like cute stuff made out of real plants, linen, silk, porcelain, glass, mineral pigments, etc. But capitalism takes a problem or question about how the world works, and finds a way to put markets between you and your objective. Like the people dunking on the anarchist in the other thread who attempted urban foraging. The obvious solution here is gardening, and most people in western countries had gardens to help sustain them before lawns became the norm. Markets eroded the relations between people and the land so badly we forgot about how to grow food!

Beauty and art aren’t just there for aesthetic appreciation, either. They create a demand for labor and big lasting projects, where modern processes prioritize automation and atomized individualized little appliances with “sleek” designs that are easy to form with as few hands as possible. There’s no way you could convince capitalists to build something like the Palace of Parliament. It had 700 architects and employed between 20,000 and 100,000 workers. Personally, I think that’s a net positive for the workers.

But yeah…I guess I don’t really know what my point is. I want to be one of those weird cottagecore nerds but that got appropriated by marketing ghouls too.